Ansible changes round brackets to square ones when using a loop

Question

I'm currently writing an Ansible role that applies my dconf settings. I have a file rolename/vars/main.yml which holds all the dconf keys and values:

gnome_dconf:
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/background/picture-uri"
    value: "'file:///usr/share/backgrounds/gnome/bell_heather_spekes_mill.jpg'"
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/calendar/show-weekdate"
    value: "true"
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/datetime/automatic-timezone"
    value: "true"
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/per-window"
    value: "false"
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources"
    value: "[('xkb', 'gb')]"
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options"
    value: "['lv3:ralt_switch', 'compose:ralt']"
  - key: "/org/gnome/desktop/interface/clock-format"
    value: "'12h'"
  ...

I then use the following task, at rolename/tasks/main.yml, to apply the list to the dconf database:

- name: Configuring dconf
  community.general.dconf:
    key: '{{ item.key }}'
    value: '{{ item.value }}'
    state: present
  with_items: '{{ gnome_dconf }}'

This the trouble is, this changes all the round brackets () in the values to square ones [] (I have confirmed this by writing the outputted values to a file with ansible.builtin.lineinfile).

e.g: [('xkb', 'gb')] is written as [['xkb', 'gb']]

I've tried escaping and quoting every way I can think of but explicitly writing the key and value in the task works as expected:

# this works fine
- name: Configuring dconf
  community.general.dconf:
    key: "/org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources"
    value: "[('xkb', 'gb')]"
    state: present

That is not an ideal or feasible solution, as I have around 150 values to apply. Am I missing something here or is this a bug?

Ansible changes round brackets to square ones when using a loop

0 Answers0